Where it all started

Since 2024 I have been using coding IDE's and having to learn and unlearn many many times as AI technology has gotten better and worse.

But let's start off in the beginning.

I started off using cursor back in 2024 when there subscription plan allowed for unlimited auto, and this allowed me to burn 1 billion tokens in a year basically for free, due to the unlimited auto. I felt like this was really awesome and a part of me knew it wouldn’t last forever, and in September of 2025 I believe that’s when Cursor updated their subscription to no longer have the unlimited auto. But for me personally that didn’t kill it for me, it was the UI / UX experience of the whole piece of software, it got AWFUL. I tried to keep on using it for months but eventually gave up in Oct of 2025 and switched over to Windsurf.

Now Windsurf to me had some perks over Cursor, like that fact that it had near unlimited auto on some of there models and this to me was a total win, and it was $5 cheaper than Cursor.

It did lack a lot of the Cursor features, but that didn’t really worry me at all.

The Devin Saga

Then one fateful day I updated Windsurf and saw they added cloud agents and it was hosted by Devin. I know nothing of Devin, and never even used the feature, because I didn’t any practical use in Cloud agents (I used Claude Code agents when I wanted cloud functionality)

The Devin addition didn’t really annoy me, but months later it would…

Now Windsurf just had the things I wanted, a simple UI and UX experience and it just worked, it didn’t have all the fancy bells and whistles as Cursor, but at least it was usable.

However, I hadn’t realised that Devin had bought Windsurf, or whatever business deal they did, resulted in Windsurf becoming Devin Desktop months later and this is when my Windsurf run ended and I left for good.

Not because Devin desktop was bad, but because at this point Cursor got good. They FINALLY probably hired a UX designer, and the software got good at being usable again and the extra stuff was still there but a lot more easy to use.

The Rise of Cursor 3.0

To me going back to Cursor was the dream. I loved the brand, ethos and overalll usability, and I am glad they finally found themselves again and got there IDE looking amazing!